What is the average startup entrepreneur age? ie your age (I am 26 almost) | Hacker News Reader

What is the average startup entrepreneur age? ie your age (I am 26 almost)

14 pointsrokhayakebe88 comments

The avg for the last YC batch was 24.5. Range: 19 to 35.

Do you have the range for applicants?

It's huge. Roughly 12 to 80.

24.5 mean or median?

mean

I know the sample size is small, but how did the +30 people compare to their younger peers, in terms of productivity/execution, dealing with adversity, etc? Any noticeable difference in character due to age?

The two main differences are that the older guys tend to be better presenters, and more tied down geographically.

Lots of talk about 'healthy white males' and 'guys' on news.yc tonight. I understand women are in the minority, but we do exist. Correction: I just re-checked the other post I was referring to and they said "healthy young male" not "healthy white male". My apologies for the misquote.

Sorry, ma'am. I happen to healthy and male, but with above average melanin. Trust me, we are aware and very glad you exist.

Thanks. Just to be clear: this isn't about my 'feelings.' It's actually about having a successful startup: one major reason people fund startups is because they think the founders have the right characteristics that will make them succeed. They're looking for a certain type of person, not just an idea. Through its posts and comments, this community shares a mental model of what type of person makes a successful founder. Having that image be of a particular gender negatively impacts those of us who happen to be women or who have women in their startup team.

This example from Founders at Work struck me: Caterina Fake, co-founder of Flickr, related an anecdote where she and her partner, who was also her husband, met with a VC firm. Caterina didn't fit the VC's mental model of a founder. After the meeting the VC told her husband 'not to bring his wife to VC meetings.'

YC wants female founders. You should apply.

>After the meeting the VC told her husband 'not to bring his wife to VC meetings.'

Another data point clustering around vc ineptitude. Why are the fools always employed as gatekeepers?

If they weren't fools, they'd be on the other side of the gate...

or employing gatekeepers...

I guess that's true in most industries - women had to work much harder than men just to get their foot in the door, but eventually perceptions change - when there are enough women there to change the (mostly unconscious, I think) perception. I think that there's a good chance for a change here. I know very few female hackers, but they tend to be really good - I guess it takes being way above average to be able to penetrate a group that's predominantly the other gender/race/views/whatever. However, if you do have the ability, and the tenacity to survive in such hostile environment, you probably have a better-than-average chance of success.

Ha! It was me who wrote the "white males" comment.

I write the way I code. Start with as big a generalization as possible and fix my edge cases at runtime...

Alas that a female news.ycer is an edge case. Even when they punch holes in my unified theory of all male startups, they are infinitely more pleasant than bus errors.

I think the better metric is

age / (# of startups)

in my case: 36/3 = 12

So how did those 3 startups work out?

The first was a group of college friends who wrote software for handhelds. It was really fun, and made enough to keep us above the grad student poverty line. We also always had nice(ish) computers. Given my low expectations, I count Scrawl as a success.

It was (effectively) cannibalized to start PatientKeeper. We raised ~$70M in venture and our software is now in use at an amazing number of hospitals. Though it hasn't had (I love this euphemism) liquidity event, I count it as a success. We employ ~90 people and touch thousands of physicans and hundreds of thousands of lives.

At the risk of being a tease, I'm not ready to talk about the third.

>We employ ~90 people and touch thousands of physicians and hundreds of thousands of lives.

Only in startup land would you have to justify that as a "success" by inserting the "although it hasn't had a liquidity event".

Congrats on creating what seems to be a healthy business!

This post is crying out for a bar graph based poll.

43 and 43. (My first startup was at 31. My partner/wife's first startup was at 20.)

26 when we started, turned 27 in June

rest of the team was 24, 24 and 26 when we started heysan

39 and trying to get my first startup done before 40

41 (first startup (architecture) @ 30) & 33

Before architecture: Victoria Bicycles (startup @ 17), Moondog BBS @17 (Used a commodore 64's random access floppy drive to create a dbase sytem), Business Design Consultants (Used an IBM PC w/ Watson soundcard and Dbase to create touch tone ordering system) @ 22

I'm 24, my biz partner just turned 32.

24 and 26 (me).

31. My first startup was at 22 though.

26 and 27(me)

19. Started the nerd club at 18.

29 (but 30 5 weeks from now).

29 and 29

21 and 22

23 and 25.

29 and 30

I'm 23!

As am I!

Seriously?

"We used to have a joke in college, that the definition of a college man was somebody who couldn't count up to 70 without laughing." -- Don Knuth, after recommending a 69-bit processor design

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=3147833455273735180#...

I'm also 32.

almost 26

19... Looks like I'm the youngest one... Suckers!

Sucker? Who's drinking the Heineken? :)

Actually, what you should have asked is "Who can get into a bar or club", since I can get alcohol any day of the week, if I wanted to :)

Those of us not governed by inane US laws?

heh. Sometimes I wish. i mean, since i was 18 (and was in college) I've known kids 21 and up....So if we wanted a six pack it was there. But only once did we ever get into a club, and I never was desperate enough to dish out $100 for a fake

If I would have had the spare $1300 for the printers + magnetic strip reader/writer plus an oddly calibrated internal risk calculus I would have really been in business.

You've also gotta draw the ID and holograms yourself in photoshop, pixel for pixel. That's gotta be a dozen hours for each ID.

I have a friend who almost got a felony conviction b/c of fake ids. But that was the 80s. These days, I don't think you'd get a plea.. identity crime is a way bigger deal.

Yeah, crime is a bad idea.

heineken? Do you know there are better beers out there? ;)

Well my beer drinking varies by season. I'm in Atlanta and it's hot right now, so Heineken fits perfectly. In a couple months I'll move to other stuff.

Don't underestimate that green bottle though. Some of my best work has been with its help.

Matt, where in Atlanta? Are you working on a startup? I'm a GT grad from Dunwoody. Shoot me a note sometime--ardell at gmail.

While you guys talk about age, i'm going to continue my focus on my end goals !

Godspeed and good luck!

(Alas, you're still 76 keystrokes behind the guys who took 2 to state their age.)

P.S.: 32

Any body working on this longterm new market?

From http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/3576594.stm

.......The Austrian team encoded their qubits using a property of light particles, also called photons, known as polarisation. This property describes the direction in which they oscillate.

Quantum teleportation relies on an aspect of physics known as "entanglement", whereby the properties of two particles can be tied together even when they are far apart. Einstein called it "spooky action at a distance".

Nah, but I would work on WiTricity if I could.

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